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Despite all this information, the author still felt like he wasn't told.

To prevent problems of being horribly spammy, all our current CPAN-wide mechanisms don't really take the initiative to reach out to the author.

And if they do, they don't really convey the level of urgency of the problem.

What I'm hoping we can do in this case is to provide an extremely low-volume mechanism that you as a normal CPAN author will never see. For example, POE has never appeared on the FAIL 100 list since I started tracking it

I actually meant more in terms of having the CPAN Testers looking at new releases faster, or having them commit to providing better levels of direct access to their hosts.

The self-reinforcing bias is interesting though, because in a sense it may be a positive thing.

If anything making it to the #1 position is then subject to even more intense examination that boosts it's score higher, this not only providing more data, but it helps expose more edge cases in what might be a quite edgy module anyway.

So once you clean up the module for the next release, you stand a better chance of not reappearing on the list in the future, compared to a situation in which you fix one bug and release to hit the reset counter on CPAN Testers only to slowly drift to the top of the list again.

Remember, the goal of the FAIL 100 list is not to judge modules as being inherently good or bad, it's to identify the places in which we get the maximum benefit for our maintenance time.

Now if this were a judgement call, a way of placing inherent value on the modules (such as the Kwalitee metrics) then I think this bias would be a bigger risk.

What I meant by self-reinforcement referred to the ranking, not the extra scrutiny. That is, the extra scrutiny from being at #1 is good – but be careful about whether/how you weigh that extra scrutiny in the next ranking recalculation. Otherwise, just making #1 may increase the chances of staying there for no other reason than the extra scrutiny (which is only due to making #1) causing extra FAILs that would not have turned up otherwise – fortifying the position against m